The Horse You Came in On Read online

  • • •

  Jury sat in front beside the driver, the other three in back. Ellen sat between Plant and Wiggins, paying far more attention to Wiggins than to Melrose, which he took to mean that she needed him more than she cared to show and was unnerved by this fact. She had stuck a book in his hands as a rather grudging welcome-to-Baltimore gift, saying he might need it for getting around.

  As she chatted nineteen-to-the-dozen with Wiggins, pointing out nothing of interest that Melrose could see in the flying landscape, he perused his book. It was a narrow but thickish volume bearing the title Strangers’ Guide to Baltimore. Each corner of the patent-shiny red cover was adorned with a little drawing of one of Baltimore’s historic sites. Trails of tiny black footprints wandered from one of these corners to another, looping from corner to corner as on a children’s game board.

  Melrose was suspicious. He glanced over at Ellen, but she was busy plying Wiggins with crystal mints and pointing out the window at God only knew what, since there was nothing much to see in this typical airport-to-center-city trip, which could have been in London, Baltimore, New York, or anywhere except possibly Calcutta. A huge hoarding advertising Black Label beer that looked overambitiously frothy; another shouting the pleasures of Johnnie Walker Red; another of a huge bucket of chicken. Dirt shoulders, concrete pilings, building equipment. Could have been anywhere serviced by an airport.

  His suspicions about Ellen’s gift were confirmed when he looked inside the red book. A family of four, the “Stranger” family, were about to set off on a junket (“junket” being the word chosen by the Bessie sisters, guide writers Lizzie and Lucie) to the Inner Harbor, a place of bright lights, little shops, and eating establishments—a place of glory to the Stranger children, apparently, given their exaggerated smiles. The trail looping around had a definite yellow-brick-road-ish tint to it. Thus the reader was to be treated to a footstep-by-footstep ramble with the Strangers, past monuments and stadiums, through parks and gridlocked streets, quite often taking time out for various treats, such as ice-cream cones and cappuccino or lunches and dinners involving a lot of ocean-catch food. Here was what looked like a platter of starfish. He looked closer at the illustration; no, they were not starfish—tiny crabs, maybe. Then came illustrations of oysters or clams with happy faces, dancing about a big serving platter; here was a rockfish frisking and grinning on a fisherman’s line and dangling above a creel; then there were lobsters merrily waving their claws above huge pots. Maryland seafood had a decided we-who-are-about-to-die-salute-you attitude. Probably why they won the Revolutionary War, thought Melrose. He’d never known Dover soles or kippers to act so cavalierly before the firing line.

  “What are you doing?” asked Ellen, as if she herself hadn’t been the instrument of his present occupation.

  “Reading, obviously.” Melrose turned a page. Washington Monument? He thought that was in Washington, D.C.

  Ellen mumbled something about not reading guidebooks, and answered Jury’s question about the structure on their right.

  “Camden Yards, the Orioles’ stadium. It’s brand new. The Orioles played their opener there.”

  Melrose closed the Strangers’ Guide and drummed his fingers on it. He could just picture Ellen in the children’s section of some bookshop, leafing through this book and chortling. He refused to react and stared straight ahead as the mute cab driver delivered them into the city of Baltimore. “Deliverance” it could very well be for Sergeant Wiggins.

  For the tallest building in the cluster that had come into view before they turned right on Pratt Street was a Florentine clock tower around the face of which was spelled out the words “Bromo-Seltzer.”

  • • •

  The cab pulled to the curb in front of a handsome brick structure in Fells Point called the Admiral Fell Inn. The Admiral Fell had not been ignored by the Bessie sisters; the Strangers’ Guide pointed out that it had once been a vinegar factory. “And a lodging house for seamen,” added Melrose, looking studiously at the book.

  “It’s a hotel, but it’s like a bed-and-breakfast. I thought you’d like that. I thought it would make you feel at home.”

  “Ardry End isn’t a bed-and-breakfast,” said Melrose.

  “It’s fine,” said Jury.

  “I’ll get it,” said Ellen, yanking bills from a worn wallet. “Until you learn to count,” she added, extinguishing the spark of generosity. This was, naturally, directed at Melrose alone, Jury and Wiggins being credited with enough intelligence to sort out another country’s decimal system without a lot of practice. Ellen reached in with the money to pay the driver.

  As they walked up the steps of the inn, she asked (again of Melrose alone, it seemed), “Well, what do you want to do? Take a nap?”

  Melrose ignored this. “What I want to do is find out what the hell’s going on so that I can get back to Ardry End.”

  Wiggins was concentrating on a large dog that lay beside the desk. It began to get to its feet, apparently thought the better of that move, and returned its head to its paws, looking up at them out of baleful eyes.

  “Grumpy, aren’t you?” said Jury, smiling at Melrose. “I have to make some phone calls.”

  “I have to teach a class,” said Ellen. “It’ll just be an hour, an hour and a half. Maybe we can meet around five?”

  “Fine. Where?”

  “We can go to the Horse. It’s just down the street. Thames Street.” She pointed out the window.

  “What’s the Horse?”

  “A local dive. I always go there. But you probably won’t like the beer. They do have Bass, though.”

  “Okay by me,” said Jury. To Melrose he said, “Are you going to have that nap?”

  Oh, ha, thought Melrose. “I’m taking a walk.”

  10

  Fells Point (Ellen had told him, as he’d set off with his Strangers’ Guide) was the oldest part of Baltimore, was indeed what Baltimore had really grown out of, and was probably the last working waterfront left in the country.

  Despite the obvious quaintness in danger of sliding into chic, Fells Point was a genuine period piece. Left to itself for over two hundred years, it was evidently becoming trendy, but it still kept the appearance of its eighteenth-century origins. It had about it a pleasant sort of scruffiness that the galleries and shops hadn’t managed to glamorize or suppress. Narrow row houses faced narrow strips of sidewalk on narrow streets. Slate roofs crowned them and sally ports divided them, walkways with painted iron gates that Melrose assumed had once been used for the passage of livestock.

  Melrose walked around the streets and along the waterfront for an hour before turning back, once again passing the Admiral Fell Inn in search of the pub where they were to meet and found it within perhaps a hundred feet of the inn.

  The flaking white paint on the sign made the swayback horse look even more like an old nag pressed into servitude by a bunch of Irish tinkers. Its expression was rather stupidly pleased, as if glad it had finally been put out to pasture. The sign of The Horse You Came In On hung above a door that probably hadn’t been painted in this century. It was a door one would pause at before opening if he didn’t know what lay behind it. It looked sly, that door.

  Melrose liked both the sign and the street. It was called Thames Street, and with its warehouses facing the water, its Belgian block, and its brick pavements, its cobbles, it reminded him a little of Whitechapel and Docklands. It was black night along the London river now, he knew, and even here a late-afternoon darkness seemed to be settling in. It had started to drizzle as he was walking, and out across the Patapsco River fog was rolling in, and the smaller craft that were moored along here would soon be enveloped in it.

  It was a low-key, no-frills little pub, narrow, with a bar along the left wall and tables and chairs along the right. He could barely see the ceiling for the substructure of smoke that clung to it, effluvium of cigarettes and cigars; and the humidity level must have risen thirty percent from the flow of beer—pitchers, bottl
es, cans. Still, it was a relief after the plummy Victorian accents of London’s West End. The place was packed with people, many of whom were in a state of frenzy, standing two and three deep at the bar, all of them watching the screen of a big television. A swell of voice had hit him when he’d opened the door, and he felt himself awash in a sea of color. Melrose wedged his way in and joined the telly viewers, whose eyes were riveted on the football pile-up now in progress.

  American football was as far beyond his ken as a moon landing. Melrose knew nothing about competitive diversions except for snooker, and he liked that because it was slow and silent—in other words, civilized. Pool was too easy and billiards too stuffy. Snooker was perfect. One heard nothing other than the occasional click and rattle of balls and the odd rousing ripple of applause, unsustained. He despised cricket, polo, and tennis. Once he had gone to Wimbledon, but got no enjoyment out of watching a couple of Slavs thrashing about with rackets, expending more energy in one backhand shot than Melrose used up in a week of sitting around in the Jack and Hammer.

  He took over a cramped stool between a burly man in a paint-smeared blue shirt and white painter’s cap turned backward and a tall black in leather and dreadlocks. “POUND IT INTO THE FUCKING END ZONE!” yelled the painter, standing up at his stool like a jockey in stirrups. The woman coming down the bar (whom Melrose assumed to be the bartender) gave him a playful punch on the shoulder and called him “Elroy.” A heavyset man and woman (man and wife, surely) dressed head to foot in football togs (red and gold), even to the woman’s earrings (miniature ballcarriers), were trying to grab her attention, but she ignored them.

  “WHAT’LL IT BE?” she asked Melrose—or, rather, yelled at him, cranking up the pitch to make herself heard.

  He thought he should forgo his Old Peculier (which they probably didn’t have, anyway) and order something American. Glancing at the row of bottles on the shelves behind her, he said, “How about an Amstel Light?”

  “WHAT?”

  He raised himself slightly and leaned over the counter. “AMSTEL LIGHT.”

  “YOU WANT A GLASS WITH THAT?”

  “DOESN’T IT COME IN A GLASS?”

  She thought he was trying to be funny and cut him a look.

  He noticed that the painter was drinking from a bottle and the black from a silver can. “BOTTLE,” he said.

  “YOU GOT IT.”

  His accent had, of course, attracted the attention of the men on either side of him, and he smiled at them, and nodded towards the television. “Who’s playing—Baltimore?”

  The two exchanged a glance over his head. “Baltimore ain’t got no team, my man,” said the black before his attention was pulled to the screen, as a cry went up from both stadium and room. “Skins and Eagles, man. Where you from?” The tone of the question (to which Melrose made a mumbled and forgettable reply) implied it surely couldn’t be this planet.

  And now, looking around, Melrose couldn’t say he blamed the man. Although he knew he’d wandered into a wave of burgundy and old gold and green, the emblematic words printed on the jerseys and knitted caps and satiny jackets hadn’t registered. REDSKINS and EAGLES.

  “Sorry,” said Melrose, a break that he supposed was a time-out allowing him to speak in a fairly normal tone. “I don’t know much about American football.” He knew enough, though, to tell the woman behind the counter to set his friends up with refills.

  The improvement in Anglo-American relations underway, the tall black said, “It’s a playoff game between Washington and Philly.”

  “Playoff?” It had looked pretty damned serious to Melrose.

  “Super Bowl, dude,” said the painter, smiling broadly and displaying a mouthful of rather chipped teeth.

  The Supper Bowl.

  He cursed himself for forgetting Diane Demorney’s morsel of information about the Colts. Before he left, he had called upon Diane to see if in her mental stockpile of arcana she could come up with anything newsy about Baltimore. Although no one had ever been deceived into thinking Diane Demorney wise, a great number of people thought her knowledgeable. Actually, Diane didn’t really know anything; her bits of information—and to give Diane her due, they were admittedly legion—floated around in a contextless sea. Most of her acquaintance had no idea that the tip of Diane’s iceberg was floating free.

  “The Orioles,” she said when Melrose asked her about Baltimore. He was seated in her stark white living room, drinking a martini. Using a long glass wand filled with stars dropping through purple-colored oil, Diane was stirring her pitcherful of vodka barely kissed by vermouth. The price of her help had been his acceptance of her invitation to stay for a drink. “A great team,” she added, tapping the glass wand on the pitcher. “Baltimore is full of rabid baseball fans.” She handed Melrose one of her sunshade-sized glasses and sat herself down on her white sofa next to her nasty white cat, which had been glaring at Melrose ever since he’d sunk into the shapeless, bottomless white leather chair. “There’s Orel Hershiser, if you’re interested.”

  “He’s an Orioles player?” Melrose was keeping his eye on the cat.

  “No, no. Los Angeles Dodgers. He’s one of the reasons they won the Series in ’88.”

  “I thought it was the Brooklyn Dodgers.” The cat was struggling with itself, waving its rump in the way cats do before they charge.

  “It used to be, but they sold the team to L.A. The name goes with them. Same thing happened with the Colts. The Baltimore Colts, it used to be.”

  He asked her more, but she’d clearly exhausted her baseball-football fund of knowledge. She moved right along to Edgar Allan Poe, who (Melrose was certain) she had never read, but about whom she knew what she considered the salacious detail that he’d “married his cousin and she was only fourteen at the time.”

  Melrose undercut this bit of gossip by telling her that marrying one’s cousin was not, in the mid-nineteenth century, at all unusual; and also that girls in their teens, even thirteen and fourteen, often married.

  And although Diane knew even less about politics than she did about literature, she moved smoothly to the Clinton administration. After she informed Melrose that the only Democrat who should have beaten George Bush was Perry Como, he drained his glass, gave the white cat a wide berth, and left.

  • • •

  A black player intercepted a pass and Elroy stood up again, yelling “Go, Art!”

  “You ain’t from around here’s my guess,” said the black man during the next time-out. His name, he said, was Conrad; his handshake was knuckle-bashing; Melrose felt to see if the small bones were still intact. He had to confess that no, he wasn’t, and a brief exchange followed about the rather boring subjects of heads of states and politics and what Melrose thought of Baltimore and whether he was going to Murder City.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Conrad chortled. “D.C., dude. Crack Capital.”

  Elroy, whose eyes didn’t even leave the television screen during the commercial, said, “Philly’s worse.”

  They argued, their argument intermittently punctuated by epithets and jeers aimed at the television, occasionally interrupted by a shout of approval.

  “It’s a shame Baltimore doesn’t have a team. Didn’t the Colts—”

  There was a troubling moment when they both turned to glower at him, but that passed quickly enough, and Elroy said, “Well, maybe we will again.”

  “Not a Chinaman’s fucking chance,” said Conrad (“Connie” to the young woman behind the bar). “Shit, Elroy, we’re sittin’ here pinned between the Skins and the Eagles.”

  Sounded uncomfortable, thought Melrose, matching their sour head-shakes with one of his own as he tried to look clever. He was glad the others weren’t here so he didn’t have to look clever in front of them.

  Play had resumed, and a chant was swelling the upper reaches of the bar—“D-D-D-D-D-D-D”—accompanied by bottles and glasses pounding on the bar in a sort of jungle-drum rhythm.

  One of the most ent
husiastic of this group was a youngish, light-haired man who stood out not only for his focused chanting but for the absence of colorful garments. No Redskins scarf, no Eagles sweatshirt. No burgundy, no green—nothing. Nothing except for what Melrose could see were very expensive clothes, no matter that they were casual. He recognized quality because he wore it himself. The fellow looked like renegade management here amongst the shop stewards, the sort of role Peter Sellers might have played in one of those labor-union-oriented comedies popular thirty years ago. He looked rich, that’s all; Melrose could sense it, being rich himself. And he also looked happy, swaying there to the tune of “D-D-D-D” and rising with the others to yell.

  One of the players had intercepted a pass. Elroy banged his bottle on the bar. “Shee-it!” he yelled as a voice announced a flag on the play. He slapped his cap down.

  Melrose squinted upwards at the screen, searching for a flag.

  “Whose penalty? Whose? Holding? Holding, God-damn!”

  If only Melrose could figure out where the ball was—ah, there! My God, but that chap could throw! The quarterback had moved back, taken aim, and put the ball in the running back’s hands as smoothly as if a wire had connected them. The receiver clasped the ball to his chest like a newborn infant. Melrose ordered his fourth beer and the same for his companions as the running back peeled yardage before he was brought down by two defensive players big as lorries.

  He was just getting into the game when he felt a tug at his elbow that he tried to shake off. Ellen was yanking at him.

  “Throw it to the posse!” yelled Elroy, up in the stirrups again.

  “Who’s playing?”

  Another cheer went up around the bar, more chanting from the other end, this time “RYP—RYP—RYP—RYP—RYP.”

  Jury, Wiggins, and Ellen were standing behind Melrose. Ellen craned her neck to look at the screen. “It’s a playoff, right?” Then to Melrose she said, “Too noisy for you?”

  With massive irritation, Melrose turned with his bottle of Amstel Light. He was tired of being Old Man Melrose, taker of naps and hater of noise. “Skins and Eagles, for God’s sake.” He tipped his bottle into his mouth and recrossed his arms along the bar.